In the early decades of the 20th century, Inverness was the summer destination of several families, especially Berkeley families, for whom architect Julia Morgan undertook projects. The buildings she designed helped form the Inverness architectural style we experience today. Morgan died more than 65 years ago, but in the intervening time her reputation has only grown.
Morgan studied engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was mentored by architect Bernard Maybeck. Maybeck had studied at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, then the world’s most prestigious architectural school, and encouraged Morgan to apply. In 1898, at the age of 26, she became the first woman admitted to the school’s architecture program. In 1904, after her return from Paris, she became the first woman to be granted an architect’s license in California.
Morgan quickly emerged as a prolific and versatile architect. Two of her 700 building projects were in Inverness: The Florence Beaver house on Mesa Way, which she built in 1920 and altered in 1928, and two cottages on Kenneth Way built for the David Atkins family in 1917. The Atkins cottages were torn down a long time ago, but the Beaver house survives.
Beaver was part of the Bay Area’s turn-of-the-century “smart set,” meaning she was fashionable, well-to-do and influential in society. From the time of her debut as a teenager, her activities and movements were regularly reported in newspaper columns. Her standing in society may help explain how Morgan found time to design her house.
Morgan had begun work for William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon in 1919, trekking there almost every weekend to supervise. Megan Mery, whose family purchased the Beaver house in 1948, said in a 1990 interview that the Inverness project provided Morgan with a respite from the demands of such a large undertaking as Hearst Castle.
Mery also believed that Beaver and Morgan were friends. If so, their friendship may have developed or deepened through work Morgan did for Beaver’s oldest brother, James Henry Pierce, for whom she designed a house in Santa Clara. Pierce was the president of the Pacific Manufacturing Company, in that era the largest wood products supplier on the West Coast. The company specialized in just the sort of fine hardwoods an architect of Morgan’s caliber might need.
Bay Area houses designed in the Arts and Crafts style of the late 19th and early 20th centuries usually featured open floor plans connecting dining and living rooms into large, flowing spaces. The houses were designed for outdoor living, often with double doors, wide verandas and large windows that open to a garden. Where conditions allowed, houses were sited to fit hillside locations and maximize views. Exterior sidings, preferably shingle, were seldom painted but instead left natural to allow the wood to age to a raisin-brown color. Architects now refer to these as brown shingle houses.
The Beaver house, situated on the mesa with a view of Tomales Bay, was designed in a rustic, wood-clad—and later, brown shingle—style. It has a hipped roof, and the front windows are glazed with large four-over-four panes. The entrance has wide double doors that open into a south-facing side garden rather than out to the street. A distinctive fireplace is topped with an open brick ventilator. The house conveys key tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement: simplicity in design, careful attention to siting to maximize views, and honesty in the choice of building materials.
David Atkins immigrated from England in 1899. He was an assayer in Sonora before co-founding a shipping company, Atkins, Kroll & Co., in San Francisco. His brother, J. Henry Atkins, was a partner in the prestigious San Francisco art gallery Vickery, Atkins & Torrey. In 1915, Morgan converted his 1860s Italianate Victorian on Green Street into a Beaux-Arts villa. One of his daughters, Avesia, studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and later worked as a draftsperson in Morgan’s office. It is not unreasonable to think that Avesia assisted Morgan in the design of the Kenneth Way cottages.
Visits to Inverness while she worked on the Beaver and Atkins homes would have afforded Morgan the opportunity to renew acquaintances. The brown shingle house one door to the east of the Beaver house was built in 1904 for the Reverend George Granville Eldredge and his wife, Julia Dornin Eldredge. Eldredge was the pastor of St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley from 1907 to 1918. St. John’s—now the Julia Morgan Theatre—was one of Morgan’s most important ecclesiastical designs. She received the commission in 1908, shortly after George became St. John’s first pastor. Julia Dornin Eldredge came from a prominent Berkeley and Inverness family. Her father, George D. Dornin, was a noted daguerreotype artist and member of the state assembly during the latter 1860s.
Professor Ivan Mortimer Linforth was a U.C. Berkeley professor and a leading scholar of ancient Greek. In 1907, Morgan designed a residence for him and his wife, Kate, on Derby Street in Berkeley. The Linforths were part of a wave of Berkeley faculty members, all of whom were friends, who began coming to Inverness in the early 1920s with their families, including the Gibsons, Tolmans, Lewises and Schevills. In her memoir “The Closing Circle,” Edward Tolman’s daughter, Mary Tolman Kent, recalled the influence of growing up on Berkeley’s Northside amid spacious gardens and Maybeck-designed houses. As an adult, Mary Tolman was a longtime Inverness resident and her memoir captures many of her Inverness memories and experiences.
One of the first commissions Morgan received was a house for William and Rachel Colby on Channing Way in Berkeley; the 1905 house is now a city landmark. A few years later, the Colbys built their Inverness house just a few doors west of the where the Atkins cottages would be built. The Colbys were a sort of Arts and Crafts supercouple, combining a Morgan-inspired architectural aesthetic with naturalist ideals. Rachel Colby was one of three women to graduate from the Hastings College of Law in 1898. Second only to his close friend John Muir, Will Colby was the most important figure in the early history of the Sierra Club, serving as a director for 49 years and as secretary from 1900 to 1946 (except for two years), and founding and leading the club’s High Trips program.
The Colbys’ Inverness house reflects Julia’s influence, not least of all in the great room’s unpainted wood interior, its orientation around a large fireplace, and the Arts and Crafts hardware finishing on the doors and cabinets throughout. The house was built by Will’s hand, and conveys the Arts and Crafts ideal of simplicity.
Courtney Linn is the general counsel at a Sacramento-based credit union and lives in Sacramento and Inverness. He thanks Dewey Livingston, Daniella Thompson and Thayer Hopkins for their research and assistance with this series.